Nearly half of the company's employees disapprove of his performance as CEO

Steve
Ballmer, 54, forms a unique and controversial figure as chief
executive of the world's largest software company. His
cracking, nasal voice brings to mind Chris Farley and his quirky
sense of humor only strengthens the comparison.

But at the end
of the day Mr. Ballmer means business, and he's been the undisputed
leader since
Bill Gates departed in January 2000. Ballmer has led the
company through some of its most glorious successes -- Windows XP,
the Xbox, and Windows 7 -- but has also been on the helm for some of
its less glorious campaigns -- Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, tablet
efforts, and Kin.

A study by
Glassdoor.com shows that the company's above outlined struggles and
Mr. Ballmer's strong personality may be outweighing his successes.
The survey of 1,000 departing Microsoft employees found that only a
razor-thin 51 percent majority approved of Mr. Ballmer's job
performance.

That's number seems more troublesome given that
overall the employees were very satisfied with Microsoft -- rating it
at 3.5 out of 5, just below the 3.8 out of 5 that Apple and Google
both received in similar recent studies.

This year has been a
stormy one for Microsoft. Despite the wild sales success of
Windows 7, the company's stock has dropped 20 percent and the company
was forced to pull its new Kin phones off the market only weeks after
it released them. The latter failure cost Mr. Ballmer a
bit of his yearly bonus. Mr. Ballmer also drew fire
for killing
Microsoft's Courier dual-screen tablet concept, which had drawn
much excitement.

Some observers say that Microsoft's
performance with its new smartphone operating system, Windows
Phone 7, and its upcoming
tablets may determine Mr. Ballmer's ultimate fate and
whether he is suitable to keep leading Microsoft. A failure in
these arenas would be a massive loss for Microsoft, and potentially
catastrophic to Mr. Ballmer's career.

Rebecca Wettemann,
analyst at Nucleus Research comments, "This is a pretty critical
moment for Microsoft, particularly as we see a shift to people
wanting access to the information they need from any device.
The winner in this space will be the one that puts a toy in the
consumer's hands that is also a good business tool for a worker's
hands."

She adds, "[Oracle CEO] Larry [Ellison] has
Fusion and [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs has the iPad, but Microsoft has had
things in development for a while without being able to get those
things to market. That's the kind of thing that sparks a
leadership change."

If Mr. Ballmer has his way he would
retire on his own volition at around 2018, according to his past
statements.

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." -- Michael Dell, after being asked what to do with Apple Computer in 1997